Why Krishn Joshi Killed his daughter?

Yesterday at landmark, they thought I was a thief. For someone who has spent atleast a hundred hours over the past one and a half years in that place without EVER buying anything except , occasionally a ten buck copy of Tehelka, they are not at fault. I lost my luggage token . It would get me my torn soiled bag with notebooks full of scribbling and chatting script that prevented me from getting dipsomania in boring psychology classes and a wallet with ten bucks in it. But on describing the exact contents and nature of bag and personal carelessness, I was unthieved. However , I had to write down my address and all that. That's not the point of the blog at all but. I was reading this book called 'Countering gender violence'. It talked about the socio -cultural aspects of gender violence. A factual account that is very disturbing for me who leads such a sheltered life in comparison. Baby girls in Rajasthan are killed when born , their necks broken by the legs of the cot on which they were born. The moment the child is born, the gender revealed and the 'tragedy' confirmed, it is accepted that she will have to be killed. Why is there no space for her? OK If I am Krishn Joshi, 45 years old and her father and I am bankrupt after having married off two daughters from an earlier marriage. Everyday is a struggle. I have been suspected for tuberculosis. My first wife is dying of anemia .The doctor at the free rural health centre yells at me in anglicized Hindi to feed her greens and meat. We just have enough to buy wheat or bajra.If only my first born had been a son. He would have been strong and sturdy; earned more per hour than I. Anyway they will fire me soon because I am coughing too much , am way too weak. And Now she had to be born. Obviously, there's no space. no i am not justifying it , I am trying to contemplate what would drive someone to kill their daughters immediately after birth. Through burying alive, feeding milk weed, smashing a fragile helpless head that contains a soul , with no space. How does one walk into this mess and clean it all up? Is it India's deeply entrenched patriarchy that manipulates women from birth into fitting into their prescribed role? Is it the fact that a woman's life is insecure from birth; she is vulnerable to rape(bringing dishonour), is expected to bring a dowry and is viewed as her father's, husband's or son's property? Of course , I am referring to rural India where even this minute some female skull is mangled voluntarily, some woman is raped, someone else is beaten by her husband. Is it only about poverty? In Indian Royal families, girls were killed the moment they were born. In some families, in a hundred years, there was only one daughter.

'And those who were dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.'

Child critic

Remember what you read when you were a child?Or do you remember thinking about that wonderful word of words when your sibling could read and you couldn't yet connect 'abcd' to the strings and strings of words in the world?I remember when I was four, I could just about read "tinkle' comics and I felt so proud.I had entered the domain of an older person.Ofcourse reading is not such a cool thing anymore among kids...not like I am a grandmom. Ten years ago , I was still in the peak of childhood.
My favourite stories were the 'Undir' stories in 'Gokulam' which were about a family of mice. Now the word is associated with 'plague', 'that disgusting creature we had to cut up in biology' and other such unpleasing associations.
At seven, the mice part of the 'Undir' family were a world of wonder. While they were still mice at heart, they still faced the essential Indian middle class situtaions that made it relatable and yet fantastic.

The mother(mouse) gets transferred and it's all seen through the eyes of children who are often ever excited about change.(Maybe we are born following Darwin's rules of adapations but grow up to forget them).They eat chapati , aloo , rice and dal for dinner. There is an American cousin who comes and is thinks the world has ended when there is a power cut.They go out for movies and are excited about eating pizza. Essentially , an Indian child could relate these events to her life more than what was served on 'cable tv' then . This was before the American epidemic and before McDonalds was a household name . Before dream purchasing powers .
Actually If I am supposedly reviewing these stories dug up from the recesses of childhood, I should comment on how it was written , by whom....i have no memory of the former and the latter..anuradha something. Besides I didn't then have the mercilessly critical eye that I have today. Thank God for that.

'Comfortably numb??"

How long will I go on with this aimlessness.. I miss the freshness of childhood. I miss not knowing the realities of the world and hence believing in it.Idealism is fading. I Wonder how people after knowing the nastiness, the filth that has choked up people's minds still go on living, believing and fighting. After knowing the universe's indifference to mankind, it's calculations and patterns of what is to us oscillating heart tugging emotions, fight. Fight against war, rape, cruelty. are these things supposed to happen as written in the victim's karma or cosmic chart by some randomly calculated calculations to suit the need of the universe?
What is the meaning of life?
I though all these saffron sporting Caucasians who came from far away lands to India to find out were mad. Then I was happy taking school girl trips and studying for exams.Now I know how nagging, haunting these questions are.I just sometimes feel so so uncomfortably numb.

Rishi Valley

This is where I lived for 7 years.Im mighty lucky ..I know.When you went to the loo you could see the mountains;in the middle of the night you could go for a 4km trek and be lulled to sleep by the warmth of the 'slash and burn' that the farmers do on another hill.Fire on the hills on a winter night.Vehicles that are loud enough to sound a thousand miles away.wake up to the sun rising between the hills.poetry classes under trees.

Student

There is an amazing shamelessness and power that comes along with being a student.Whether it's having the privilege not to tip or making 'house' on the stairs in front of a bank for hours together being treated to the whiff of 'AC' when the door opens.
Wearing a saris for two hours and smiling will get you a thousand bucks..(not that my parents would approve) and free food..(and drinks) at these swank five star hotels. People find this mentally degrading. I think not , even with all my feminist talk and having read the first ten pages of Simone De beauvoir's 'The Second Sex'.For the uninitiated, she is a french feminist who redefined the concept of feminism.
It gives you some pocket money and is better than whiling away two hours at the college food court laughing about how Ms So and Mr SoSo are dating..honestly its better than sitting in English classes listening to a story that your seventh standard teacher taught so beautifully being m urdered.
Or creative writing classes where the teacher tells you the one and only format used for diary entries.What's so creative about that? I mean look at my blog entry..does it have a format, organization or one solid theme?
Not that it is creative but still.
Being a student also gives you an excuse to be a rebel with no cause, to steal 'saunf' from restaurants in tissue paper , eat dosas in the shack in some sewer lined alley and not worry about the details appearing on page three of the Bangalore Times. ..
I think I'll always be a student.

My mind is throbbing with words,
My world is brimming with stories,
I interview and each line that’s said,
To me (with the self importance of an intern)
throws in angles.
Human relations whirling around held together by words,
Pulsating in light and in dark,
With lasers and radars and outside lights flashing.
The lights blind us from the enormity of what’s beyond and we tread on,
Living relations ,
in a whirlpool of dynamism.
Three dimensional migraine even to a seemingly bland student and
In the electricity in her head,
Or the rapists,
Or the woman in whose head the thought of herself didn’t bother to strike,
Or the other who strayed from a loveless marriage to soothe her emptiness,
Or the student who cheated to get through ,
Or the student who didn’t cheat but was ‘caught’
The first bragged,
The second found no way,
The Tibetan woman with
the acid burns on her face ,
that a Chinese dissatisfied far away created,
won’t see her pain contorted smile.
will make a story that sells,
but to make her vomit those words that she wishes to digest,
It’ll make a good story.
It’ll make a good story but clichéd though it might sound,
We are all in a play that’s been planned,
The directors random
And there are no rehearsals dear.
When the air sags and the energy’s clammy,
It’s all there dear packed in a hanging bag,
It crawls away from the child’s face and is sealed up Or the clown at heart who sweeps movie halls
Or the ….
Suddenly the world falls into place.
Only the words don’t.
My mind is ablaze and the words are whirling but the sentences just don’t string themselves together and formless thoughts haunt me,
For want of shelter, a cocoon , a niche in a thick layered word,
Warm, secure and the meaning still fresh within the crevices of the word,

Post theatre low

After all my desperation to hurriedly start a blog, I forgot my password and it's taken me so long to get it back and in the process I even tried starting another blog but i thought it unfair. When I checked yamini.blogspot.com , I found one post posted centuries ago and thought it would be unfair to join the bandwagon of blog name stealers.
Cut the crap . I am sitting at the Hindu office suffering from severe writer's block(not that the symptoms are not already quite prominent) and can't come up with any story idea that is either 1.not already been done before or 2.sensational .
Why don't I have a creative mind that just churns up stories. Oh, i wrote a poem once when I was in one of those rare states. Will post it later.
The most significant thing that happened last week was my theatre group's performance.....;there really is no feeling in the world that matches up to performing when it's full house . I think if i continue , it will be an insult to the institution of grammar and punctuation..for now it's writer's block, post theatre low(nothing to fill up my evenings and after four months of theatre everyday, it's such an empty feeling), and dreading college.There is so much to say but I just can't seem to string words together today so BYe!!!!!

ZTEKY-Before you dismiss me off as some psuedo writer who is naming her blog after a (misspelt) Russian dish, I have to confess that I have no clue what that word means but my shockingly small vocabulary didn't come up with something that other blogspot users hadn't already come up with. And, Yes! I tried everything from 'schizophrenia'(It's not that Im dumb but it's just that Im too lazy to check spelling) to 'uncreative' and 'undefined'. Well, I was really desperate to just (well) have some space of my own so I needed a blog so ZTEKY it is.
I don't feel like introducing myself and all that as I should traditionally.
Will write better tommorow and check spellings too..

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?
Bob Dylan

'I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas' T.S Eliot

'Have you been born yet?Do you feel alive?' The Doors
On that note , NIGHT!